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Jiang Yanli finds her husband, at last, in the bath.
He had not come to find her for dinner, which was more unusual than not, of late, nor had he been in their rooms or his study, and the servants were not moving about in the harried way that meant someone had recently been hauled off to the Fire Palace, so she did not think he would be there either.
It is a strange thing to think — and a thought Jiang Yanli will certainly not be sharing with him — but Wen Ruohan, for all his power and pride, looks remarkably like any other man whilst sitting gloomily in the bathtub. Soggy. Not particularly dignified. His hair clings to his neck and shoulders in wet clumps, and a jar that had at one point no doubt contained an unwise quantity of kaoliang dangles loosely from his fingertips where his hand is draped over the edge of the tub.
This, Jiang Yanli gently takes from him as she kneels beside the bath. He frowns vaguely in her direction when she does, but it is a watery thing with no real malice in it. Wen Ruohan can cut steel with a look when he wanted to, but at the moment it seems like even glowering brings no pleasure. Jiang Yanli suspects he had been drinking in here for quite some time.
These moods came upon him, now and again. They were certainly not as frightening as the black moods that saw him withdraw to his Fire Palace for days on end, until he emerged smelling of blood and ash and buoyed with a wicked sort of cheer. Horrid as they were for everyone — not least the unfortunate souls chosen to receive the sharp edge of Wen Ruohan's ire — those at least could usually be traced to a specific offense, and exorcised by some focused cruelty, after which he would emerge with a sharp edge to his smiles that spelled danger for whoever had been so foolish as to cross him.
Jiang Yanli is not sure what it says about her that she finds that sort of bad mood easier to overlook. Perhaps it is simply that it conforms to what she'd known about him before he became her husband, what the world had whispered about him her whole life.
The mood she finds him in tonight, by contrast, is a sort of grey malaise. When this kind of distemper comes over him, he haunts the private areas of Nightless City like a ghost, floating along with a detached despondence or lying in a sad heap somewhere, as though nothing in the world would ever catch his interest again.
These moods, Jiang Yanli always yearns to soothe.
She has not quite learned the trick of it yet, because Wen Ruohan is not the sort of man much inclined to accept soothing. She suspects it runs too close to pity, in his mind.
She raises the hand she had relieved of its liquor to her lips and kisses his wrist. His fingers, as she suspected, are wrinkled from soaking when he brushes them over her jaw with a soft sigh.
"Would Wen-xiandu permit Li'er to wash his hair tonight?"
"I will not be good company for Li'er tonight," he says morosely. "I suspect I may not be good company for anyone at all, you see."
"Yanli can decide whose company she would like to keep," she replies. "Let me wash your hair."
He does not say anything to that, but neither does he argue when she moves around behind him and begins to massage perfumed soap into his scalp. Jiang Yanli likes having him under her hands like this, the way he relaxes into her touch and lets her take the weight of his head. She can feel the shape of his skull under her fingertips, and she drags her thumbs along the tense place where it joins his neck until she feels the muscle there go slack.
She wonders, idly, whether the strength he had given her would be enough to snap his neck if she decided to. She wonders if he thinks of it too, when he lets his defenses down like this and makes himself so pliable in her hands.
Jiang Yanli rinses the soap from his hair instead. A glimmer of silver at his temple catches her eye, and her hands pause ever so briefly in spite of herself.
"You've seen it then," Wen Ruohan states, not nearly as drowsy as he'd been pretending to be. "It's true. Your husband is ancient of days, practically a corpse already."
Was this what had sent him to the bathtub to mope? Jiang Yanli does not laugh. "My husband is very handsome," she replies instead. "And I, for one, welcome a little silver if it means I will not one day look like his grandmother, rather than his young bride. Surely Ruohan's ego is not so big it cannot allow his wife this simple thing?"
She does not think it is vanity, entirely. There was a time her knees would've ached from kneeling on the floor this long, when her hands would've cramped from washing his hair. She knows the qi he gives her every time he smooths out her damaged meridians costs him, no matter how prodigious his own cultivation is. That Wen Ruohan has likely given up immortality for her sits unspoken between them, a shocking gift that Jiang Yanli can never repay.
She knows he would be insulted if she tried.
"Ah, well," Wen Ruohan says after a long moment. "If you like how they look, then I suppose my ego can bear the indignity of a few grey hairs."